Full press reviews
Theatre Bath *****
Petra Schofield
“Welcome to webcamland” the phrase strikes horror in the hearts of most parents along with the dangers of grooming or sexual exploitation. However this stunning new play from Pipeline Theatre shows a different world. Here, those left to wander the void of bereavement are torn apart and the results are both heartbreaking yet startlingly possible. The vulnerability of both child, adult and sex worker are explored with equal voice and the results are explosive.
Rosa, 15, is an innocent young girl used to private education and nannies. Her mother has died and her father loses the house and his business. They find themselves in cheap rented accommodation and their new neighbour Candy, is a “web –camming” sex worker whose agoraphobia stops her leaving her “princess palace” but provides a safe haven for Rosa from her alcoholic, broken father.
Performances are outstanding. The writing is fluid, natural and fiercely original sparking deep emotions whilst challenging many preconceptions and stereotypes.
Anna Munden (Rosa) is mesmerising, her transition from school girl to escort is breathtaking, engaging the audience at every step ensuring that there is not a shred of sentimentality but just the brutal reality of her life. Angus Browns (Toby) is terrifying as a broken, threatening father desperate to cling to life and find a meaning without his wife. Kyla Goodey (Candy) is a wonderful creation of vulnerability, haunted by her past and desperate to keep her palace her own and the world a click away.
The simple set designed by Alan and Jude Munden is very effective, the projections, puppetry use of sound effects supports this production effortlessly; facilitated by the ever present Nix Woods.
This is small scale theatre at its best. It is an assault on the emotions, not in its shock value but in the very real way that life can come apart and at which point did friendship become grooming. This is a harsh, provocative play, and it is very clear that Pipeline Theatre are a company to be reckoned with, this is work of the highest quality and should not be missed.
The Upcoming *****
Laura Foulger
Pipeline Theatre’s Streaming stands very sturdily on a tripod of fantastic writing, flawless character acting and innovative set design. So armed, it creates a piece of theatre of such startling depth and rawness that it is impossible to come away from it unchanged.
Following the death of her mother and the loss of their lavish lifestyle, Rosa and her father Toby move into a shabby flat from which they attempt to reassemble their lives from the rubble. They meet neighbour Candy, an agoraphobic “glamour puss” who spends all day in her flat, entertaining strangers via her webcam – or “camming”, as she calls it. Toby writes her off immediately and suggests that his daughter steer clear of her, but it is Rosa and Candy who grow steadily closer while Toby spirals into ever more crippling alcoholism. Rosa begins to make some out-of-character decisions, to Toby’s despair – but any paternal authority has long since been jeopardised.
Woven through this story is the parallel tale of The Wizard of Oz, which Toby references with increasing frequency, to the point of delirium. From a Follow the Yellow Brick Road ringtone to the appearance of a masturbating flying monkey, the skewed allusions range from touching to comical to sinister. Humour is a veneer that covers a dark and desolate isolation. You’ll laugh at the characters’ idiosyncrasies, drawn in only to be cut all the deeper by the pain their predicament wreaks upon them. At times, Streaming is almost unbearable to watch.
In most aspects this piece is a tragedy, but there are moments of horror, as the misery manifests itself into some uniquely unsettling moments. This is where the set and lighting truly shines. The drearily papered walls of the flat double up as projector screens, or turn transparent to reveal ghosts from the past. Tricks like a magician’s sleight-of-hand see props appear unexpectedly where a second before there was nothing. One moment that lingers is Toby being caressed by disembodied arms as he sinks into his armchair.
Writer Jon Welch’s three disparate characters are fully rounded and subtly nuanced. Kyla Goodey’s is perfect as neurotic Candy; Angus Brown’s determinedly cheery Toby is flawless. Anna Munden is wonderful as Rosa, employing a voice that inflects upwards at the end of every sentence: the pretension of youth tinged with a child’s anxious inquisitiveness.
By casting a delirious eye on family dysfunction, isolation and how these are endured, Pipeline Theatre have created something devastatingly beautiful.
The Audience Club *****
I see that in 55 reviews, I have, to date, awarded five stars five times. This is the sixth. Within minutes this gem of a play had me gripped, and retained my absorbed and undivided interest to the end. Well-written and beautifully, indeed almost flawlessly acted, it was involving, believable and at times almost unbearably poignant.
Everything Theatre ****
Neil Johnson
Superb cast, outstanding staging, strong original script.
After 16 years in London, I love the fact that I am still discovering new theatres and the Pleasance, hidden up in Islington, is stunning. As I was ushered into the auditorium and saw three girls dancing in red windows gyrating vacuously from side to side, I knew I was in for a theatrical treat.
Streaming is mesmerising. It’s the perfect example of contemporary drama at its best! This dark drama tells the tragic tale of three lost souls and grips you from the sraer. Rosa is an insolent, yet impressionable, posh 15 year old who is struggling to adapt to life without her recently deceased mother and her lost Chelsea way of life. Toby is Rosa’s father who has turned to alcohol after losing his wife and fortune. Candy is their new acrophobic neighbour with a dodgy boob job who wiles her days as a webcam girl charging men £3.50 per minute to watch her perform. Throw these three characters together, mix them in with some creepy puppets and Wizard Of Oz references, and you have a surprising and gripping show on your hands.
There are so many factors that make this show a cranial feast, most importantly the outstanding performances. The play starts, holding no punches, with a drunk Rosa dancing for us and telling us her life story and how she got to be in her red window. We then, through some fantastic staging, go back to the beginning and see this journey for ourselves. Anna Munden as Rosa is superb. Through Munden’s gripping performance, we see an obtuse and well educated teenager evolve into ‘Dorothy’, her webcam persona. Kyla Goodey as Candy, the damaged neighbour who finds confidence and solace in the cold embrace of the online world, is sublime. From subtle glances and pregnant pauses to perfect comic timing and heartfelt emotion, Goodey’s layered performance is outstanding. The scenes between both Rosa and Candy, as they become friends and sort out their respective dead mother and lost sister issues, is a joy to watch. Equally, Angus Brown is sensational as the tortured Toby. I didn’t warm to Toby at first, yet as the play progresses and he realises the true toll his drinking has taken on his daughter’s innocence, it’s hard not feel for him.
Although there were only three in the cast, there was a fourth vital person on stage: Nix Woods, who played the pivotal role of set changer. Woods was also in charge of all of the fantastic puppetry that would suddenly appear throughout the play. It may sound odd to have puppetry in a play that analyses the descent into online webcamming, but trust me it works. The set as a whole is remarkable as its completely adaptable. Over the course of the play, the three red windows shift into all sorts of different scenarios with ease.
Jon Welch’s original script is superb. I found many of the more dramatic scenes riveting to watch as the dialogue and staging was beautifully handled.
Streaming is quite honestly one of the best plays I’ve seen this year and deserves to be supported. This multi-layered work makes you imagine a modern day Oz, in the form of the world wide web, and think about just how easy young girls can be enticed into this dangerous land. Could it be your daughter? Your neighbour? Do you know?
Broadway World
Gary Naylor
A magnificently realised play, the ambition of which never gets in the way of its storytelling, delivered through three of the strongest performances I have seen all year.
Rosa's mother, a City lawyer, has died and that hardly helped Toby, her father, who takes another drink for every call not returned and, since he's stalled in the wheeler-dealer world of Mergers and Acquisitions, that's plenty. As the red demands mount up, Rosa and Toby downsize to a flat on a sink estate, with Toby out of a job and Rosa contemplating Sixth Form in a local comprehensive - a far cry from her publiuc schooling to date. Across the corridor lives, or rather hides, Candy, whose combination of a dodgy boob-job and agoraphobia makes her perfectly suited to her job as a webcam girl, a fantasy figure for men willing to pay £3.50 per minute to watch her perform. Soon Candy is working through her sister issues with Rosa, while Rosa works through her mummy issues with Candy. And Toby? He hits the bottle even harder.
Streaming is a bold, funny, clever, but ultimately moving examination of a corner of life happening right here, right now. No wobbly American accents, no revival of a sure thing, no adaptation of a film - just Pipeline Theatre doing contemporary drama. It's the kind of drama that does an old-fashioned job - it holds a mirror up to the world and asks us what we think of what we see.
Working on Alan and Jude Munden's brilliantly adaptable set - one that can transform from living room to corridor to peep show almost instantaneously - the three actors do not so much play as inhabit their roles, crucially investing these extreme people with an achingly vulnerable humanity.There's excellent work too from Nix Woods's on puppets and Jon Welch on lighting, the two working in tandem to create an otherworldly quality to the most ordinary of flat's interior.
Kyla Goodey's Candy is uneducated, damaged and about as distant from Anna Munden's Rosa as one can imagine, yet their friendship blossoms naturally, the tiniest looks and gestures bringing them together. Angus Brown's Toby may have no redeeming features, but we understand that he is a man made bad and not a bad man, a judgement underpinned in a beautiful and touching scene in a taxi with Candy. Anna Munden has a lot to do transforming Rosa from a posh, sullen teen into something quite different, and does so in a sensational performance that carries Jon Welch's script for well over two hours. If any of these three had toppled into caricature, the delicate balance of this outstanding play would have been lost, its ecology broken.
In many ways, Streaming is a universal story, but, told like this, it is both up to date and highly relevant to the way we live today. And uniquely theatrical.
Wynn Weldon
Arts Blogger
At the risk of being accused of hyperbole (which is a serious charge), I’d suggest that Streaming by Jon Welch, performed by Pipeline Theatre at the Pleasance Theatre in Islington contains three of the most powerful performances available to theatre goers in London at the moment. I can’t guarantee that there aren’t equally good performances elsewhere, because I’ve seen very few plays recently, but the energy, conviction and sheer stage presence of Angus Brown, Kyla Goodey and Anna Munden is exhausting in just the way it ought to be.
Of course a good script to work to is important, and they have that in Welch’s downbeat riff on the Wizard of Oz. A father, Toby, and daughter, Rosa, previously well-to-do, have fallen on hard times following the death of wife/mother and the loss of Toby’s job, and have had to move into low-rent accommodation. Their neighbour, Candy, provides online sexual favours for paying clients. She befriends the lonely, teenage Rosa, who finds disagreeable her father’s desperate attempts on the one hand to get work and on the other to keep her happy. Toby declines into alcoholism; Rosa moves in with Candy, becomes ‘Dorothy’, and starts her career as a webcam girl.
Perhaps I could be accused of spoilers but actually what grips right from the start is the intensity of the performances. According to the author’s notes in the programme, the play is an investigation into the cost of the objectification of women, but actually – and this saves it from being a simple-minded piece of agitprop - one’s sympathies are not wholly with Rosa. Toby’s situation – widower, financially ruined, alcoholic, and with a teenage daughter intent on making her own way – is hardly to be envied. Either we must accept that his advice to his daughter not to make friends with Candy is sensible or we must decide that Rosa at sixteen is old enough to make her own decisions. In the final masque there is a sense that Rosa and Candy have somehow triumphed over Toby, who has been reduced to a wordless masturbator. It is hard to feel that any of the characters deserve their fate.
Angus Brown and Anna Munden make an astonishing pair on stage, the one manic in his despair, for ever rubbing his scalp (hair all pulled out perhaps) pinching the bridge of his nose, and stalking the small room, his phone limpit-like to his ear. In contrast Anna Munden as Rosa is quiet, with a mesmerising stillness. This stillness directs one to her face. She acts with her eyes, and the movements are never affected; always subtle, always natural, but also always emphatic. Having seen her in Pipeline’s previous, brilliant, production,Transports, it is evident that she has the makings already of an exceptional actress. She has inimitability. No-one is like her and she is like no-one.
There is comedy and comedic pathos in Kyla Goodey’s performance as Candy. I had been concerned to begin with that she was playing too close to the Catherine Tate character Lauren Tate or Vicky Pollard, but she stayed just the right side of stereotype.
As with Transports, the stagecraft is exemplary. So often in Fringe theatre the audience is made uncomfortable by the awkwardnesses of the staging. Pipeline do holisitic work, all is of a piece. It is difficult to imagine the play being done in any other way. The design is simple but clever, the lighting and sound design more or less flawless, the costumes properly thought about and executed.
This is first rate theatre. Go and see it.
The Cornishman Newspaper
Fi Read
Explosive, but on another level, was Pipeline Theatre’s latest production: Streaming. Writer Jon Welch has never been one to shy away from difficult subject matter. The quality of his scripting is simply phenomenal, and the characters heartbreakingly terrible. Here he investigates the seedy world of webcamming online porn, and it’s not pretty.
The tone is set in the opening scene where three hookers are gyrating in red lit booths. It’s dark, shocking and alluring all at the same time. And it gets worse. Lives in freefall, there’s the wheeler-dealer dad who loses the plot after losing the deal, his house, his wife to cancer and his 15 year-old daughter. The ex-borstal teen turned webcam candy, imprisoned in her ‘palace’, a hermit world of online banking and shopping, daytime TV, QVC wigs, cheap cava, fake tan, and business transactions where she can’t smell their sweat and they can’t touch her through the screen. And the daughter who dresses up as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz to earn a quick internet buck, before being screwed over by the industry in a scene that will stay with me forever.
Highlighting the disturbing truth that live-streamed chat/sex/prostitution is the new normal, only a click away, and that girls and women continue to be exploited and abused by societal values that objectify and dehumanise them, this should be compulsory viewing for boys and young men everywhere.
Actions have consequences. Streaming left me reeling, feeling as if I’d been punched in the guts, made me feel angry, distressed and sad, but most of all moved. It’s a powerful story, with powerful performances by Kyla Goodey, Anna Munden and Angus Brown, masterfully presented by a Cornish company that deserves global recognition for their unflinching, visceral, contemporary theatre. Besides, the hamster special FX were genius. Currently performing a three week run in London, if you get the chance, see it.
Petra Schofield
“Welcome to webcamland” the phrase strikes horror in the hearts of most parents along with the dangers of grooming or sexual exploitation. However this stunning new play from Pipeline Theatre shows a different world. Here, those left to wander the void of bereavement are torn apart and the results are both heartbreaking yet startlingly possible. The vulnerability of both child, adult and sex worker are explored with equal voice and the results are explosive.
Rosa, 15, is an innocent young girl used to private education and nannies. Her mother has died and her father loses the house and his business. They find themselves in cheap rented accommodation and their new neighbour Candy, is a “web –camming” sex worker whose agoraphobia stops her leaving her “princess palace” but provides a safe haven for Rosa from her alcoholic, broken father.
Performances are outstanding. The writing is fluid, natural and fiercely original sparking deep emotions whilst challenging many preconceptions and stereotypes.
Anna Munden (Rosa) is mesmerising, her transition from school girl to escort is breathtaking, engaging the audience at every step ensuring that there is not a shred of sentimentality but just the brutal reality of her life. Angus Browns (Toby) is terrifying as a broken, threatening father desperate to cling to life and find a meaning without his wife. Kyla Goodey (Candy) is a wonderful creation of vulnerability, haunted by her past and desperate to keep her palace her own and the world a click away.
The simple set designed by Alan and Jude Munden is very effective, the projections, puppetry use of sound effects supports this production effortlessly; facilitated by the ever present Nix Woods.
This is small scale theatre at its best. It is an assault on the emotions, not in its shock value but in the very real way that life can come apart and at which point did friendship become grooming. This is a harsh, provocative play, and it is very clear that Pipeline Theatre are a company to be reckoned with, this is work of the highest quality and should not be missed.
The Upcoming *****
Laura Foulger
Pipeline Theatre’s Streaming stands very sturdily on a tripod of fantastic writing, flawless character acting and innovative set design. So armed, it creates a piece of theatre of such startling depth and rawness that it is impossible to come away from it unchanged.
Following the death of her mother and the loss of their lavish lifestyle, Rosa and her father Toby move into a shabby flat from which they attempt to reassemble their lives from the rubble. They meet neighbour Candy, an agoraphobic “glamour puss” who spends all day in her flat, entertaining strangers via her webcam – or “camming”, as she calls it. Toby writes her off immediately and suggests that his daughter steer clear of her, but it is Rosa and Candy who grow steadily closer while Toby spirals into ever more crippling alcoholism. Rosa begins to make some out-of-character decisions, to Toby’s despair – but any paternal authority has long since been jeopardised.
Woven through this story is the parallel tale of The Wizard of Oz, which Toby references with increasing frequency, to the point of delirium. From a Follow the Yellow Brick Road ringtone to the appearance of a masturbating flying monkey, the skewed allusions range from touching to comical to sinister. Humour is a veneer that covers a dark and desolate isolation. You’ll laugh at the characters’ idiosyncrasies, drawn in only to be cut all the deeper by the pain their predicament wreaks upon them. At times, Streaming is almost unbearable to watch.
In most aspects this piece is a tragedy, but there are moments of horror, as the misery manifests itself into some uniquely unsettling moments. This is where the set and lighting truly shines. The drearily papered walls of the flat double up as projector screens, or turn transparent to reveal ghosts from the past. Tricks like a magician’s sleight-of-hand see props appear unexpectedly where a second before there was nothing. One moment that lingers is Toby being caressed by disembodied arms as he sinks into his armchair.
Writer Jon Welch’s three disparate characters are fully rounded and subtly nuanced. Kyla Goodey’s is perfect as neurotic Candy; Angus Brown’s determinedly cheery Toby is flawless. Anna Munden is wonderful as Rosa, employing a voice that inflects upwards at the end of every sentence: the pretension of youth tinged with a child’s anxious inquisitiveness.
By casting a delirious eye on family dysfunction, isolation and how these are endured, Pipeline Theatre have created something devastatingly beautiful.
The Audience Club *****
I see that in 55 reviews, I have, to date, awarded five stars five times. This is the sixth. Within minutes this gem of a play had me gripped, and retained my absorbed and undivided interest to the end. Well-written and beautifully, indeed almost flawlessly acted, it was involving, believable and at times almost unbearably poignant.
Everything Theatre ****
Neil Johnson
Superb cast, outstanding staging, strong original script.
After 16 years in London, I love the fact that I am still discovering new theatres and the Pleasance, hidden up in Islington, is stunning. As I was ushered into the auditorium and saw three girls dancing in red windows gyrating vacuously from side to side, I knew I was in for a theatrical treat.
Streaming is mesmerising. It’s the perfect example of contemporary drama at its best! This dark drama tells the tragic tale of three lost souls and grips you from the sraer. Rosa is an insolent, yet impressionable, posh 15 year old who is struggling to adapt to life without her recently deceased mother and her lost Chelsea way of life. Toby is Rosa’s father who has turned to alcohol after losing his wife and fortune. Candy is their new acrophobic neighbour with a dodgy boob job who wiles her days as a webcam girl charging men £3.50 per minute to watch her perform. Throw these three characters together, mix them in with some creepy puppets and Wizard Of Oz references, and you have a surprising and gripping show on your hands.
There are so many factors that make this show a cranial feast, most importantly the outstanding performances. The play starts, holding no punches, with a drunk Rosa dancing for us and telling us her life story and how she got to be in her red window. We then, through some fantastic staging, go back to the beginning and see this journey for ourselves. Anna Munden as Rosa is superb. Through Munden’s gripping performance, we see an obtuse and well educated teenager evolve into ‘Dorothy’, her webcam persona. Kyla Goodey as Candy, the damaged neighbour who finds confidence and solace in the cold embrace of the online world, is sublime. From subtle glances and pregnant pauses to perfect comic timing and heartfelt emotion, Goodey’s layered performance is outstanding. The scenes between both Rosa and Candy, as they become friends and sort out their respective dead mother and lost sister issues, is a joy to watch. Equally, Angus Brown is sensational as the tortured Toby. I didn’t warm to Toby at first, yet as the play progresses and he realises the true toll his drinking has taken on his daughter’s innocence, it’s hard not feel for him.
Although there were only three in the cast, there was a fourth vital person on stage: Nix Woods, who played the pivotal role of set changer. Woods was also in charge of all of the fantastic puppetry that would suddenly appear throughout the play. It may sound odd to have puppetry in a play that analyses the descent into online webcamming, but trust me it works. The set as a whole is remarkable as its completely adaptable. Over the course of the play, the three red windows shift into all sorts of different scenarios with ease.
Jon Welch’s original script is superb. I found many of the more dramatic scenes riveting to watch as the dialogue and staging was beautifully handled.
Streaming is quite honestly one of the best plays I’ve seen this year and deserves to be supported. This multi-layered work makes you imagine a modern day Oz, in the form of the world wide web, and think about just how easy young girls can be enticed into this dangerous land. Could it be your daughter? Your neighbour? Do you know?
Broadway World
Gary Naylor
A magnificently realised play, the ambition of which never gets in the way of its storytelling, delivered through three of the strongest performances I have seen all year.
Rosa's mother, a City lawyer, has died and that hardly helped Toby, her father, who takes another drink for every call not returned and, since he's stalled in the wheeler-dealer world of Mergers and Acquisitions, that's plenty. As the red demands mount up, Rosa and Toby downsize to a flat on a sink estate, with Toby out of a job and Rosa contemplating Sixth Form in a local comprehensive - a far cry from her publiuc schooling to date. Across the corridor lives, or rather hides, Candy, whose combination of a dodgy boob-job and agoraphobia makes her perfectly suited to her job as a webcam girl, a fantasy figure for men willing to pay £3.50 per minute to watch her perform. Soon Candy is working through her sister issues with Rosa, while Rosa works through her mummy issues with Candy. And Toby? He hits the bottle even harder.
Streaming is a bold, funny, clever, but ultimately moving examination of a corner of life happening right here, right now. No wobbly American accents, no revival of a sure thing, no adaptation of a film - just Pipeline Theatre doing contemporary drama. It's the kind of drama that does an old-fashioned job - it holds a mirror up to the world and asks us what we think of what we see.
Working on Alan and Jude Munden's brilliantly adaptable set - one that can transform from living room to corridor to peep show almost instantaneously - the three actors do not so much play as inhabit their roles, crucially investing these extreme people with an achingly vulnerable humanity.There's excellent work too from Nix Woods's on puppets and Jon Welch on lighting, the two working in tandem to create an otherworldly quality to the most ordinary of flat's interior.
Kyla Goodey's Candy is uneducated, damaged and about as distant from Anna Munden's Rosa as one can imagine, yet their friendship blossoms naturally, the tiniest looks and gestures bringing them together. Angus Brown's Toby may have no redeeming features, but we understand that he is a man made bad and not a bad man, a judgement underpinned in a beautiful and touching scene in a taxi with Candy. Anna Munden has a lot to do transforming Rosa from a posh, sullen teen into something quite different, and does so in a sensational performance that carries Jon Welch's script for well over two hours. If any of these three had toppled into caricature, the delicate balance of this outstanding play would have been lost, its ecology broken.
In many ways, Streaming is a universal story, but, told like this, it is both up to date and highly relevant to the way we live today. And uniquely theatrical.
Wynn Weldon
Arts Blogger
At the risk of being accused of hyperbole (which is a serious charge), I’d suggest that Streaming by Jon Welch, performed by Pipeline Theatre at the Pleasance Theatre in Islington contains three of the most powerful performances available to theatre goers in London at the moment. I can’t guarantee that there aren’t equally good performances elsewhere, because I’ve seen very few plays recently, but the energy, conviction and sheer stage presence of Angus Brown, Kyla Goodey and Anna Munden is exhausting in just the way it ought to be.
Of course a good script to work to is important, and they have that in Welch’s downbeat riff on the Wizard of Oz. A father, Toby, and daughter, Rosa, previously well-to-do, have fallen on hard times following the death of wife/mother and the loss of Toby’s job, and have had to move into low-rent accommodation. Their neighbour, Candy, provides online sexual favours for paying clients. She befriends the lonely, teenage Rosa, who finds disagreeable her father’s desperate attempts on the one hand to get work and on the other to keep her happy. Toby declines into alcoholism; Rosa moves in with Candy, becomes ‘Dorothy’, and starts her career as a webcam girl.
Perhaps I could be accused of spoilers but actually what grips right from the start is the intensity of the performances. According to the author’s notes in the programme, the play is an investigation into the cost of the objectification of women, but actually – and this saves it from being a simple-minded piece of agitprop - one’s sympathies are not wholly with Rosa. Toby’s situation – widower, financially ruined, alcoholic, and with a teenage daughter intent on making her own way – is hardly to be envied. Either we must accept that his advice to his daughter not to make friends with Candy is sensible or we must decide that Rosa at sixteen is old enough to make her own decisions. In the final masque there is a sense that Rosa and Candy have somehow triumphed over Toby, who has been reduced to a wordless masturbator. It is hard to feel that any of the characters deserve their fate.
Angus Brown and Anna Munden make an astonishing pair on stage, the one manic in his despair, for ever rubbing his scalp (hair all pulled out perhaps) pinching the bridge of his nose, and stalking the small room, his phone limpit-like to his ear. In contrast Anna Munden as Rosa is quiet, with a mesmerising stillness. This stillness directs one to her face. She acts with her eyes, and the movements are never affected; always subtle, always natural, but also always emphatic. Having seen her in Pipeline’s previous, brilliant, production,Transports, it is evident that she has the makings already of an exceptional actress. She has inimitability. No-one is like her and she is like no-one.
There is comedy and comedic pathos in Kyla Goodey’s performance as Candy. I had been concerned to begin with that she was playing too close to the Catherine Tate character Lauren Tate or Vicky Pollard, but she stayed just the right side of stereotype.
As with Transports, the stagecraft is exemplary. So often in Fringe theatre the audience is made uncomfortable by the awkwardnesses of the staging. Pipeline do holisitic work, all is of a piece. It is difficult to imagine the play being done in any other way. The design is simple but clever, the lighting and sound design more or less flawless, the costumes properly thought about and executed.
This is first rate theatre. Go and see it.
The Cornishman Newspaper
Fi Read
Explosive, but on another level, was Pipeline Theatre’s latest production: Streaming. Writer Jon Welch has never been one to shy away from difficult subject matter. The quality of his scripting is simply phenomenal, and the characters heartbreakingly terrible. Here he investigates the seedy world of webcamming online porn, and it’s not pretty.
The tone is set in the opening scene where three hookers are gyrating in red lit booths. It’s dark, shocking and alluring all at the same time. And it gets worse. Lives in freefall, there’s the wheeler-dealer dad who loses the plot after losing the deal, his house, his wife to cancer and his 15 year-old daughter. The ex-borstal teen turned webcam candy, imprisoned in her ‘palace’, a hermit world of online banking and shopping, daytime TV, QVC wigs, cheap cava, fake tan, and business transactions where she can’t smell their sweat and they can’t touch her through the screen. And the daughter who dresses up as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz to earn a quick internet buck, before being screwed over by the industry in a scene that will stay with me forever.
Highlighting the disturbing truth that live-streamed chat/sex/prostitution is the new normal, only a click away, and that girls and women continue to be exploited and abused by societal values that objectify and dehumanise them, this should be compulsory viewing for boys and young men everywhere.
Actions have consequences. Streaming left me reeling, feeling as if I’d been punched in the guts, made me feel angry, distressed and sad, but most of all moved. It’s a powerful story, with powerful performances by Kyla Goodey, Anna Munden and Angus Brown, masterfully presented by a Cornish company that deserves global recognition for their unflinching, visceral, contemporary theatre. Besides, the hamster special FX were genius. Currently performing a three week run in London, if you get the chance, see it.